


like grains of sand, the years slipped from my grasp

by schweinsty



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Pre-TFA, Rey needs more love, all the hugs, and hugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:02:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5660602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweinsty/pseuds/schweinsty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Rey is five, her family drop her off on Jakku and don't come back. When she is nineteen, she follows their lead. This is the story of some of what happens in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like grains of sand, the years slipped from my grasp

When Rey is five, someone abandons her on Jakku, a planet with so much space taken up by sand that there is not a lot of it left for kindness.

It makes her wonder who she is, later on, that Unkar Plutt actually sets someone to keep her safe until she’s old enough to fend for herself. It doesn’t mean much, really-scavengers who take her out to the ships and use her to get into spaces too small for them to reach, food and water each evening even when she doesn’t know enough to earn it. It’s so little, but no one hurts her, no one kills her, and she doesn’t starve; for Plutt-for Jakku-it’s abundant generosity, and it makes her lie awake at night, when she is older, and wonder who could possibly be rich and powerful enough to make Unkar Plutt show kindness to a useless human child.

 

One or two other children live in the vicinity of Unkar Plutt’s junkyard who do odd jobs for him, pick-pocketing travelers and hiring out to scavengers for the sort of work that Rey does, squirreling into crawl spaces or climbing up to spots that won’t bear too much weight.

There’s a boy named Kal who is nine years old when she arrives. He’s small and quick and strong and angry all the time, and he knows how to curse in six different languages. Rey admires him greatly. 

One time when Kal is twelve a man tries to kidnap him from the market; he’s a slaver, probably, and Kal screams and kicks and actually bites off one of the man’s fingers when the man tries to put his hand over Kal’s mouth. 

The slaver screams and curls up around his hand for a few seconds, which is all it takes for Kal, panting and bloody-mouthed, to scramble to his feet and run.

Rey helps him hide himself behind a curtain and makes wide, innocent eyes when the slaver stalks by.

Kal, in thanks, teaches her how to throw a proper punch, and suggests she find herself a weapon since she is still so small.

 

Jakku is hot and lonely and achingly big. One time, when Rey is nine, she steps wrong inside a ship, falls ten feet, and lands on her wrist. It snaps.

Her scream echoes through the ship and out into the dunes beyond it, but no one hears, and no one comes.

She crawls out of the ship one-handed and walks the four miles to the little hut where Shoofa, the old woman who knows how to bandage cuts and stabilize crush injuries, lives with her sister.

 

Rey deeply values the AT-AT where she lives, even if she doesn’t like it very much. It’s cramped and uncomfortable but hers, and hers alone. When she is eleven, someone breaks into it in an attempt at theft. She is out working and she has nothing worth any money anywhere, except the flight simulator she found and practices on, but the thief doesn’t take it and leaves unsatisfied. The thought of someone in her home unsettles Rey. She carries a wrench for defense, usually, but after this she sets to work and builds herself a proper staff. She carries it with her everywhere she goes and sleeps with it clutched, with her doll, against her chest.

Also when she is eleven, Kal tries to kiss her. It’s pretty terrible, and she doesn’t like it, and he laughs at the look she gives him and doesn’t try it again. It’s not a mean laugh, and he doesn’t storm off in a huff, and he teaches her how to dislocate a man’s shoulder as an apology, so Rey counts the whole thing as a generally positive experience, despite the slobber.

 

She realizes, later, that she wasn’t used to the sand when she was left on Jakku. She tripped in it and fell her first day there, and it skinned her palms.

She realizes she’s from a planet where sand, at least, is not as commonplace as this. 

That night is the first time she dreams of an island.

 

When Rey is twelve she visits Shoofa again, but this time she’s not alone. It’s Kal’s turn to take a misstep while scavenging, except that instead of breaking an arm, he ended up with a half-ton chunk of steel landing on his left leg.

Rey hears him screaming, but he’s unconscious by the time she finds him. She ties a tourniquet around his thigh and cuts him free before she loads him on her speeder. It’s hard work, and he’s heavy, and her hands are slippery with his blood when she starts and stick to the controls when she reaches Shoofa’s house, and she doesn’t realize until much later when she tastes salt on her lip that she cries at all.

Kal doesn’t die.

He sells himself instead; ten years of indentured servitude to a trader for a prosthetic.

“Too bad you don’t know how to make those yet,” he tells her the last time she visits him. He smiles, which is unlike him except for when he laughs at her, and he tells her he hopes she makes it off of Jakku someday.

That night she cries alone in her AT-AT until her stomach hurts.

 

When Rey is thirteen, Shoofa comes to visit her instead, one evening when they are both tired from work. She sits down without being asked and eats half of Rey’s bread and tells Rey about the changes that are going to happen to her body and how children come into the world and why men should be guarded against.

“What you have between your legs,” Shoofa says, “Is so valuable and worth nothing at all. Men want it so much they would pay a month’s wages to get at it, but they value it so little that they think it makes you worthless. This is why you keep that thing-”

-and she gestures towards Rey’s staff-

“You keep that with you everywhere you go, and watch for anyone who spends too much time watching you, or stands too near you all the time.”

When Rey walks her out, Shoofa spends a long moment staring out at the dunes near her AT-AT. 

“You’re all alone here,” she says eventually, “But you can see them coming long 'fore they get here, if they ever do.”

And she leaves.

Not long after that she wakes up in the middle of the night and her stomach is cramping so badly that for a minute she thinks she’s dying. She feels horrible that day and the next, light-headed and weak-kneed and nauseated. She goes to the ship, of course, and tries to work, but she’s slower than usual, and she only manages to scare up a quarter portion’s worth. 

Unkar Plutt watches her when she meets him that day; she feels his eyes linger on her as she walks away.

She barely sleeps that night, starting at every creak of cooling metal. Her eyes feel like she’s rubbed them in sand the next morning, and she vomits halfway through her meal.

 

She wakes up, she goes to the ship, she goes to Plutt’s market, and she goes home, and if she doesn’t feel like speaking to Unkar when he hands her the day’s portion, she doesn’t speak.

One morning she realizes she hasn’t said a word in seventeen days. She thinks Kal would tell her to scratch that out on her wall, too.

 

Kal never though her family would come back for her. She always told him he was wrong. She always told herself he was wrong, too.

 

Sometimes, though-sometimes Rey hangs out at the junkyard when Unkar gets one of his ships fixed up for sale. She likes messing around with things and making them run better, and she likes sitting in the pilot’s chair imagining it’s her simulator come to life and that she’s flying.

Unkar doesn’t seem to mind, much, seeing how she’s good at making things run better, though he ignores her suggestions half the time. Some of his mechanics don’t, and they tell her, sometimes, about parts she hasn’t seen before. Those days she talks quite a bit.

 

When Rey is seventeen, Unkar has one of his goons beat a man to within an inch of his life. The man tried to kill Rey; tried to sneak up on her with a knife and slit her throat to steal something she’d found on the ship. He’s mad-sun-mad, someone says-but Unkar decides to use him as an object lesson.

Rey wonders at the extent of his deal with her family. He can’t let her be murdered, so her family -her family must have cared, must have told him to make sure she survived, must have paid him an enormous sum of credits to do so because Unkar Plutt wouldn’t move a finger if he didn’t get something out of it. They must have been in a hurry, not able to specify care beyond that-or maybe they knew she needed to grow up tough and sharp and ready to defend herself. Maybe they’re pirates; smugglers. Maybe they’re with the Resistance. Maybe-maybe-

Maybe they’ll be back any day to take her home.

A small voice in the back of her head wonders if Unkar didn’t want to lose a scavenger he made so much money off of, if maybe he’d had some quarrel with the man and wanted to use the attack as an excuse. 

Rey quiets it with another mark on the wall.

 

When Rey is eighteen, Shoofa’s scavenging in the front part of a downed ship, digging into a control panel, when the roof caves in and she suffocates in the sand. No one misses her for six days.

 

When Rey is nineteen, she runs out of her AT-AT after supper at the sound of a commotion and finds Teedo trying to steal a droid.

 

When Rey is nineteen, she meets a boy who isn’t Kal, who grabs her hand and panics and asks her if she’s okay.

 

When Rey is nineteen, Han Solo, legendary smuggler, offers her a home, and for one minute she lets the thought hang in her mind that she doesn’t have to be alone, and it warms her.

 

When Rey is nineteen, she flies.

 

When Rey is nineteen, snow falls around her and Finn stands beside her and Kylo Ren blocks their way, and he puts out his hand when she goes for her blaster and she flies-flies up, up into a tree and falls and hits the ground so hard it takes her a minute before she can get back on her feet.

She comes up swinging.


End file.
